In the House of Sands
by jibrailis
Summary: A fic based on Neil Gaiman's short story "Keepsakes and Treasures."


His name was a thing of sand and wind. It was so beautiful that it made the sun weep hot waxy tears that hit his skin and burned it oh so delicately. Like a European lady taking bites out of her dinner, the tears marked the length of his arms and the curve of his neck. He wept in agony the first few days and the Mother Superior fed him valerian, but it didn't help. He writhed and screamed and tried to claw out his face but she grabbed his wrists and slammed him like meat into the wall.

"No," she hissed. "You are not allowed to do that."

He did not reply. The women never allowed him to speak. They washed his body and oiled his limbs and brushed his hair until it gleamed, but they did not allow him to speak.

He was not bred for strength, nor intelligence.

Sometimes, when he looked in the mirror that smelled of piss, he called himself Tle.

Tle's tribe never stayed in one place for long. They had their horses and they had their ways, which mostly meant the old magicks, capable of taking a man and vanishing him against his will. The Shahinai moved from city to city, using their horses hard, but nobody else could see the horses. If any other person looked, they would see a wisp of wind instead and would be left with the residue of sand in their mouths. Tle rode on the back of the Mother Superior's horse, his arms wrapped around her thick waist, holding tightly.

The day he was born, two barbarian men were killed because they had dared to touch him. Since then Tle had never seen another male; until he was half-grown, he did not even know that others such as him existed. He thought that maybe the thing sticking out between his legs was a mutation, a curse from the gods. He used to watch the women of his tribe, yearning after them in a manner that was partly sexual but mostly not. Because more than he wanted to lie with them, he wanted to be them. He wanted to have mounds on his chest and browny flesh where his aberration was. He wanted to grow his hair long and have hips that swung. He wanted to wear their cloaks and speak with their accents and ride like they did, as they had done for millennia.

Instead, they tucked him into bed and called him their treasure.

When he was older, he understood the truth. That he would never be a woman and that he was the most beautiful person in the world. It didn't stun him. It didn't bother him. He simply nodded and held out his hands so that one of the women could rub the calluses away with an ointment taken from the stomach of a camel.

When he dreamt that night, he dreamt of wide open deserts and the bones of dead animals.

The year Tle turned seventeen, Mr. Alice bought him.

It was his first time witnessing another man. Mr. Alice was big and fleshy and Tle thought him wonderful. As the Mother Superior spoke to Mr. Alice's servants in low, demanding tones, Mr. Alice touched Tle and touched him and touched him and touched him. When he lifted Tle's white robe so that Tle's ass was shining in the candlelight, Tle shivered.

Mr. Alice's home was a bright, modern apartment. He guided Tle to the bed and poured him a glass of wine, which Tle drank with dizzying excitement. Then Mr. Alice took the glass away and kissed him; just a soft touch, a murmuring of lips to lips. Tle kissed him back to the best of his ability and felt his body thrumming with sand.

Mr. Alice fucked him on top of the sheets and Tle bled like life-nourishing water.

:::

That night he dreamt of oceans and drowning women. When Mr. Alice's servants led him to the washroom and helped him bathe, Tle saw his own reflection in the mirror and recoiled because he was ugly now, blotchy and disfigured and scarred. He screamed and thrashed, and the servants tried to hold him down calling for help, but Tle convulsed until the oceans returned and he slumped over the bathtub, senseless. When he woke he was in Mr. Alice's bed again and Mr. Alice was stroking his hair.

"You beautiful, beautiful boy," he said. "Don't ever do that again."

:::

The next night Tle did not dream at all. Nor the night after that, until the day he died.

_"Sometimes, at night, I'd have dreams about the Shahinai women - these ghastly, batlike, hag things, fluttering and roosting through this huge rotting old house, which was, at the same time, both human history and St. Andrews Asylum. Some of them were carrying men between them, as they flapped and flew. The men shone like the sun, and their faces were too beautiful to look upon."_

- "Keepsakes and Treasures" by Neil Gaiman


End file.
